Pushing back the clock on civilization

Friday, Dec. 16, 2005 | 7:13 a.m.

UNLV archaeologist Alan Simmons has spent decades researching what many scholars believe was the beginning of civilization as we know it.

Focusing on a period 10,000 years ago, when mankind began to give up nomadic hunting and gathering for farming and village life, Simmons' excavation work in Jordan and Cyprus has shown that the world's first farmers were far more sophisticated than scholars previously thought.

His work, UNLV officials hope, could help the university itself to soon be seen as far more sophisticated than previously thought.

The globe-trotting archaeologist's work, which has broken some ground in the field, is exactly the kind of work UNLV is pushing its professors to develop as it advances from being a commuter school with a reputation for basketball to a world-renowned, premiere research institution, said Edward Shoben, dean of the College of Liberal Arts.

"This is the kind of thing that research institutions are supposed to do," Shoben said, "and it will improve our access to other projects."

After years of just trying to keep up with the growth and develop new programs, the push now is to take programs that are "good" and make them "excellent," President Carol Harter has repeatedly said.

She has made advancing research one of the university's top priorities. Jim Rogers, chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education, recently made it a goal to double the amount of research dollars coming in in the next five years.

Simmons is one of the professors leading the way with both his research and his ongoing work to develop the department of anthropology and ethnic studies he chairs, Shoben said.

Other UNLV archaeology professors are doing excavation work in the Lake Mohave area, in Moapa Valley, in New Mexico and Alaska, and anthropology professors have ongoing projects all over the world, including China, Thailand, Egypt, Spain and Belize.

That broad range in projects is due to hiring a mix of promising new people and people like Simmons, who come in with research projects already in the works, Shoben said. Much of the private money Rogers and Harter are trying to raise would go to recruiting and keeping more of those scholars at the university.

UNLV helps stimulate research through internal grants, Shoben and Simmons said. In Simmons' case, a $20,000 grant from UNLV to do test excavation work in Cyrpus helped him win a three-year, $109,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

UNLV's International Programs office has also provided money to help Simmons bring undergraduate students on field excavations to Jordan and Cyprus.

About $150,000 in National Geographic and the National Science Foundation grants paid for the initial excavation at the site in Jordan, Simmons said. He still is churning out research articles on that work.

Simmons has worked in the Middle East since doing excavation work in Israel as a University of Colorado undergraduate in 1970. When he came to UNLV in 1993 from Desert Research Institute in Reno, Simmons was already doing excavation work in Jordan and Cyprus.

He has focused on the Neolithic Revolution of 10,000 years ago when people became farmers.

"I'm interested in that transition because if it wouldn't have occurred, we wouldn't be here today -- for better or for worse," Simmons said.

The 3-acre site in Jordan has given him and his fellow researchers greater insight into how agriculture and in turn civilization developed, Simmons said.

By developing a sustainable food supply, the Neolithic farmers allowed populations to expand and specialists to develop in other areas, paving the way for communal society.

In an ancient village in Jordan, his team has found impressive architecture for the time, including a public space that may have been a theater.

Archaeologists also discovered an elaborate infant grave that indicated the child may have come from an important family, meaning the village had some kind of stratified social structure.

The study of how these ancient people lived is relevant because many of their struggles as society developed still affect us today, Simmons said.

"How humans adapted to an arid environment is important given that we live in a desert," Simmons said.

The excavation of the site, done between 1996 and 2000, was a joint project between UNLV and the Jordan Department of Antiquities. Simmons is now working with his Jordanian counterpart, Mohammad Najjar, to preserve the site as an archaeological park for both educational and tourism purposes.

Unlike many of the country's neighbors, the kingdom does not have income from oil and does not have the cash needed to do the preservation work on its own, Simmons said.

Simmons is now using a $40,000 grant he won from the U.S. Ambassador's Fund for Cultural Preservation to preserve the Neolithic village in Jordan for eco-tourism.

By excavating the site, he and his fellow Western researchers have left it more vulnerable to destruction, and it's the "ethical thing to do" to preserve it, he said.

"There's this long history of Westerners going to these countries and pillaging," Simmons said. "If we are going to do the research, it should at least be partially our responsibility to preserve it."

Christina Littlefield can be reached at 259-8813 or at clittle@ lasvegassun.com.